Previously in the saga of going offline to write: creation over connection and no creation what now.
I’ve been off social media for three weeks and will stay off for another three, because my replacement social media laptop won’t be here until early September. I can feel myself go insane.
I still have a Discord server and a couple of group chats on Signal, but I feel like I’m in solitary confinement. I’m used to having daily peripheral social contact with like a hundred people. I’ve been writing 1000-3000 words a day on a novel, but I find myself also writing deranged monologues, trying to reach out, connect.
I have been struggling to talk to my friends. I have a bunch of writing queued up for this blog that I have been unable to post. I’m going to just dash this out and try not to worry about quality because - I need to get something out.
After all these years, RSI caught up with me during this writing month. I’m dictating this. I feel dumb. I’m like an octopus. Half my brain lives in my fingers.
The obvious place to start is to talk about my novel. I have some projects I’m proud of – that I think are original and somewhat highbrow. This is not a novel like that. I started it while I was depressed earlier this month, getting Claude to generate most of the text because I was too down to write myself. I’d never done this before – I’d previously only delegated technobabble, architecture descriptions, etc. I wanted some schlocky comfort erotica. Then I was like, hypothetically, if this were a full story, what would the climax look like? And I came up with something that filled me with such unholy glee that it consumed the next three weeks of my life.
I’ve read about four books on how to plot novels. I’ve never been able to use what I learned to write one. I ran into problem and didn’t know how to solve them. Couldn’t connect theory and practice. Things are different with Claude. I write + prompt a bunch of garbage and then I ask it for a plot repair diagnosis. It says something that’s half obvious, a quarter nonsense, and a quarter correct and non-obvious. I take that last quarter, add some notes and decisions of my own, get stuck, and repeat.
I can feel the principles I learned about from the theory books fly together and finally connect. “Right, Claude, of course the problem is that the protagonists’ separate quests in this arc have no effect on each other. Thanks. You’ve listed three bad ways to make the quests connect, and one way which is almost right…” And then I go walk around for an hour, trying to make it right.
I intend to post this story on an alt account and disclose it was largely AI-generated. It will get very little readership, and a majority of that readership will be hostile. This makes me sad. It’s not that I want to be credited with ownership of the work – a lot of it isn’t mine. I expect the total word count to be a third fully my writing, a third heavily edited AI drafts, and a third fully AI. But I find myself sad that they will not see – not want to see – how grueling and exhilarating this process was too. Collaborating with Claude is stretching my brain and forcing me to grow in ways that years and years of writing on my own didn’t. It’s forcing me to solve problems that come up in Act 3, a part I rarely got to before – I’m more used to writing the beginning and end.
I try to be good and dictate, but I still end the day with dull fire running from my wrists to the middle of my forearms.
I have so much loyalty to this novel that’s not original, not going to be that good, never going to get read. I also feel like it’s tearing me apart. I am a worse parent. There are real-life responsibilities I am falling down on, which I am too ashamed to enumerate here.
My partners are shockingly supportive. I feel I must be one of the luckiest incompetent-creative housewives in the world. It’s fine that you didn’t cook tonight, even though that’s literally your job. I understand you’re working on something you think is important. Our child can eat pizza. Again.
Deep down –
When I was lactating, I would wake up having slept through my pumping alarms. And part of me, the dutiful serious part, would go “oh no, I am bad, I must do better”. But it was a shallow part. The real deep part of me was going, “that was worth it, I feel great, I value sleep more than making milk”. The dissonance was immediately noticeable.
Now, I’m struggling to cook, do chores, stay engaged with my toddler. When I try to put my dutiful serious face on and go “this is bad, I have to get my life in order”, I hear the deep, wild, actually-in-touch-with-values part of me chuckling and going “but I know it was worth it to write (and deploy bug fixes to Gallae to let Claude write longer and more complex responses) until 2:30am”, like a satisfied goblin king who has won.
That part does feel wicked – identifies with being wicked, sucking up resources from the rest of my life. Only incidentally, though. It’s not malicious or competitive. Its primary feeling is like –
It feels utterly righteous in creation.
It feels bad to be isolated. I feel confused and sad.
But also, it’s so satisfying to have my happiness so disconnected from the approval of others. I feel godlike. At the end of the day, whether I feel amazing or shitty rests mostly on what I think of my work. I feel like I’ve been plucked from the world, rescued.
It feels dangerous and strange too, because things can go haywire when you plug your inputs to your outputs.